Seriously, how many stories are needed on this topic? It was a very minor, localized issue that has already been dealt with in a manner that has garnered almost universal Slashdot love; stories over, nothing to see here.

The real stroy is where exactly did the fakes come from. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to create these fakes and I find it hard to beleive they only made 100-200 and then quit.

It could be theft, but often the point is not to fool the end buyer or even a company like NewEgg, but Intel.

Pretend you are a large Intel authorized distributer. You buy processors in the tens of thousands at a time. Lets say, for sake of this story, you buy 10,000 procs at $100 from Intel and sell them at $110. But, due to the nature of the industry (and Intel's tight control on the pricing), a few months down the road Intel gets to adjust the cost of that processor to $70. But, to keep their distributors happy, Intel offers price protection, which means they will pay you the $30 difference on any existing inventory when the price drops.

So you have two options:A: You could take the honest road and continue selling the procs at $110, lower your price when the price drops, and take the Intel price protection on any remaining inventory.B: Or you could just scam Intel.

Here's how:1. Upon hearing about the price drop, you start selling your procs at a slight loss, say you sell them at $90. The point here is to move them as fast as possible w/o loosing too much money. But hey, your procs are cheaper than anyone else's, so they will sell like used panties from a Japanese vending machine.

2. Lets say you manage to sell off 9,000 of your original 10,000 procs by the time the price drop hits. At this point you are down about $90,000 on your original investment.

3. When Intel comes around to ask how many processors you have left, you tell them 8,000 units. In your spare time, you managed to fill 7,000 boxes with lead procs, so that if you get audited by Intel, they will see that you do indeed have 8,000 boxed units. Intel then pays up on the $30 price protection on 8,000 units. You get a check for $240,000.

After it is all said and done, you just netted a cool $150,000. It is certainly easier than, you know, actually competing in the commodity processor market.

Oh, right, so how do these lead processors make it to the end user? So, imagine that the above mentioned scenario happens a lot. At any point in time, there are quite a few warehouses with fake processors waiting to be destroyed after they duped the Intel auditors. Well, every once in a while, the warehouse staff ships the wrong palette. But, these palettes of fake procs don't usually make it to the end user as there are almost always at least one middle man between you and the Intel authorized distributer. Often, the fake procs are noticed by the middle men (many have X-ray machines to scan all deliveries because this happens often enough). Usually, the authorized distributer makes up a goofy story to explain this and quickly replaces the fake procs with real ones.

I don't know the details of the NewEgg issue, but I suspect this time they just made it past the middle man.